Touch the Sound
by Clone Number 5
Summary: There's something to be said about silence. [Smellershot.]


**Note: **_I have a new OTP! Sadly, I don't have as much time as I'd like to put down all of the Smellershot (tm _Jimmy the Gothic Egg_) fluff bunnies running through my head. But I did type this up (in about 15 minutes. Sigh.) while I was listening to "The Sound of Silence." Have a nice weekend!_

**Touch the Sound**

_"'Hear my words that I might teach you,  
Take my arms that I might reach you.'  
But my words like silent raindrops fell,  
And echoed  
In the wells of silence."_

_-The Sound of Silence, _Simon & Garfunkel

_-x-__  
_

The attack seemed like hours.

He stayed in the mud, bleeding, for days.

Death took forever.

But in an instant - two, actually - he lost his voice and his name.

_-x-_

They were all broken. A bit like old toys, they'd been thrown about until their limbs were just barely hanging on and their painted-on smiles began to peel. Slowly, painfully, they became ruined. 

And like old toys, they are eventually tossed into the garbage. A fateful prestidigitation somehow brought them together.

No one talks about it; no one really has to.

They were all broken, but at times he doesn't think that it's very fair that he's the only one that's broken from the outside. Where people can see.

_-x-_

At first he doesn't know what to make of her. 

She has the tossled locks of a boy, but the soft smile - rare, but not quite extinct yet - of a girl. There is dirt under her fingernails, an edge to her wit, and a stubborness to her chin that refuses to duck dociley away from confrontation.

For a while, he just doesn't know what to make of her. So eventually he doesn't try to make anything of her at all.

It is a simple gesture, but she seems to appreciate it.

_-x-_

He's never had a sister before, so he's not quite sure if she qualifies. If sisters are like close friends, he supposes she counts. 

But then a tiny smile creeps across her lips - an unexpected treasure - and there is a flutter in his stomach that he doesn't think associates very well with _"sister."_

_-x-_

The pub is deathly silent, so the sound of his fist colliding with the soldier's jaw explodes like a cannon. The man crumples to floor, but when he looks up she has already pushed her way to the door.

The damage has been done.

He stares down at the soldier with an uncharacteristic expression of disgust. _Bastard._

_-x-_

"Don't say anything," she mumbles into her knees. 

He gives her a long look, but lets it go. The sunlight is dull on her ruddy hair, and he thinks that she is pretty.

Humiliated, but pretty anyway. How anyone mistakes her for anything _but_ a girl is beyond him sometimes.

He pushes the thought back, and brushes her bitter tears away with his thumb. _That_, he tells himself sternly, _is not a good thing to think about your friend._

The message is slightly harder to get across when she sighs and slumps against him, her flat figure suddenly painfully girlish pressed up to his. 

_-x-_

"Sometimes," she tells him, "I wonder what your voice sounds like."

Her tone is very soft as she says it, low and scratchy and accidentally lovely. Truthfully, he prefers the paradoxal quality of her voice to what he remembers of his.

He nods silently, acknowledging her. It's not really an answer, but he can't say what he wants, even if he could.

_-x-_

At night, he lies awake and stares up into the trees. The earth is hard against his back, but the stars are soft on his eyes. 

Over and over, he mouths her name. Because secretly, he wonders what it would sound like.

_-x-_

It happens in an instant. 

Dusk has fallen over the woods, and moonlight bathes her sleeping face. And she is something so fragile that he fears for her. Under the pale glow of white, he can see every line in her face, and every fissure underneath her skin. For someone so strong, she is surprisingly breakable.

More than anything, he doesn't want to risk leaving her side. Just in case someone else realizes that she's not quite so invincible.

And in that instant, something becomes glaringly obvious.

_-x-_

"Longshot?" she says all of a sudden, and he glances up. 

Her eyes catch his. "Let's get out of here."


End file.
